Click on Book to Order

Breakfast in Babylon
Emer Martin. Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 321pp. $12.00

R. Thomas Coyne

Welcome to "Babylon"-the slimy, stone sidewalks of Paris; the dope and debris stuffed squats of London; the prostitute and dealer infested alleyways of Amsterdam.

Meet two of its chief inhabitants-Isolt, a young Irish woman in exile, a tinker for the 90's, a perpetual foreigner wandering the third-world basement of the first-world; and Christopher, the hoodoo man, Isolt's misogynist partner, an American expatriate, a washed-up dope dealer tied to the world by little more than his addiction.

This is the world found in Emer Martin's Breakfast in Babylon, a wonderfully authentic trip through the underbelly of Europe. In this young writer's award winning debut, Martin gives us a healthy dose of the bizarre, lurid life of a lost generation. Her fresh, sharp prose moves forward with a relentless trajectory, twisting the tragic and unredeemable into the wonderfully absurd and often comical.

While fiction at the millennium seems resigned to the task of offering the commonplace as something new or extraordinary, Martin reminds us what a joy it can be to read fiction of a different variety, fiction which makes the foreign and bizarre feel immediate and familiar. A reader feels wonderfully filthy after spending an afternoon with Martin's cast of misfits, begging on the pavement or conversing in a café, ordering rounds of beer with the pocket change of the working class.

Martin's Babylon is a world without a place for the members of a young diaspora that "have all been born with homeless souls." The novel engages in, but rises above, an interrogation of patriarchy (religious, social, familial) through a young woman who belongs more to her exile than to her home country. Transient lives search for connection and choice as they wander the streets of Babylon-not a bad place for a laugh, a bit of hash, or even breakfast, but a place where "You can not wake the good God up."